Category: media

It didn’t take the DVD pirates long to get illegal copies of the year’s hottest movie onto the streets of New York, and it didn’t take the NYPD long to launch a crackdown. “Cops seized 1,000 pirated copies of Star Wars: Episode III – just 36 hours after its debut. The illegal DVDs, selling for less than half the price of a movie ticket, were stacked nearly to the ceiling of a Harlem storage facility, alongside 40,000 other illegal disks.”

Canada’s film community had high hopes going into Cannes, with critically acclaimed new films by David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan leading the pack. But when the festival wrapped up this weekend, Canada went home empty-handed. So what went wrong?

Movie attendance is falling, and even the expected mega-hit Star Wars installment isn’t likely to turn things around. “If Americans went to the movies every week, as they did during cinema’s heyday in the 1940s, the national box office would be running about $2 billion a week, which it’s not even close to. Audiences have cooled on the moviegoing experience, in which high ticket and food prices and hit-or-miss sound and projection systems in neighborhood theaters have driven people to create their own Friday night popcorn experience.”

A proposed new security system for DVDs would add an RFID tag and require biometric information to view the disk. “At the store, someone buying a new DVD would have to provide a password or some kind of biometric data, like a fingerprint or iris scan, which would be added to the DVD’s RFID tag. Then, when the DVD was popped into a specially equipped DVD player, the viewer would be required to re-enter his or her password or fingerprint. The system would require consumers to buy new DVD players with RFID readers.”

Culture ministers from across Europe see the internet as a way to improve distribution of European culture and compete against Hollywood. “The fact this discussion has taken place in Cannes this year and the fact all these culture ministers, ISP providers and industry figures have got together to discuss it, shows that using online distribution is imminent.”

Ever since critics began screening the latest (and last) installment in George Lucas’s Star Wars epic, the whispers have been building that, perhaps, the turning of young Anakin Skywalker to the Dark Side and the concomitant rise of the Empire are not wholly devoid of reference to current political theatre. Specifically, Skywalker, (or Darth Vader, as he comes to be known in the film,) seems to utter a number of hubris-inspired challenges which sound suspiciously like lines previously used by President Bush. Lucas, for his part, insists that it’s all a coincidence.

“The business of cleaning up movies has sparked a round of skirmishing in the culture wars and launched a patent brawl in the technology industry as well. Hollywood directors say that removing swear words and bare breasts compromises their artistic vision and violates their copyrighted material. Meanwhile, a Florida company claims that a technology used to skip over the dirty parts steals from its own patented method used to skip right to the dirty parts.”

Satellite radio seems to be gaining a toehold in the US. XM says it has passed the 4 million subscriber mark and was on track to hit its goal of 5.5 million subscribers by the end of the year. “XM said it added 1 million subscribers since late December. XM’s rival in the satellite radio business, the New York-based Sirius Satellite Radio Inc., reported last month that it had 1.4 million subscribers and expected to have 2.7 million by the end of the year.”

The buzz is building at Cannes, as a series of strong films debut. Regulars are beginning to say this might be one of the strongest festivals in years, writes Roger Ebert.

Weekend box office numbers for movies are completely bogus. “Once upon a time, when the studios owned the theaters and carted away locked boxes of cash from them, these box-office numbers meant something. But nowadays, as dazzling as the “boffo,” “socko,” and “near-record” figures may seem to the media and other number fetishists, they have little real significance other than to measure the effectiveness of the studios’ massive expenditures on ads.”